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Sports Direct Web Estate

Exhilarating performance with the DNN Evoq CMS.

Cantarus helped Sports Direct adapt to an expanding brand portfolio, increased sales growth and demand.

This was achieved through delivering comprehensive e-commerce functionality and a highly optimised web content management system.

The Challenge
Help Sports Direct adapt to an expanding brand portfolio, increased sales growth and demand.

Faced with an ever-increasing list of brand acquisitions and over 80% online sales growth in 2011-12, supporting www.sportsdirect.com’s development was vital for their seasonal surge in demand.

To better handle the volume of traffic and transactions, Sports Direct sought a scalable, available and robust e-commerce platform, enabling content managers to easily maintain and update the site. The legacy system presented a number of concerns: • Non-scalable and expensive to maintain, • Labour intensive: only technical staff could update and upload new content, • New front-end web technologies not utilised, • Deployment of new brand websites was too time-consuming.

As new brand acquisitions increased, maintaining a legacy system with a challenging set-up became a struggle. Bringing newly acquired third-party websites into the existing e-commerce team before deployment was essential by unifying supplier extranets and integrating Sharepoint into the platform. This process delayed customers’ ability to purchase immediately, consequently Sports Direct required a Microsoft.NET Solution to de-couple their e-commerce offerings from the previous system to a more resilient online infrastructure to allow for a rapid return on investment.

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Our Solution
Deliver comprehensive e-commerce functionality.

Cantarus consultants collaborated on-site with Sports Directs’ own IT development team and DNN’s technical specialists to architect a solution tailored to Sportsdirect.com’s complex, technical and demanding business requirements.

Sports Direct’s minimum requirement was to replicate the functionality of their current website into a content management system that could be updated easily. Upon transferring existing code into DNN, the rapid development for a proof-of-concept website was created.

The DNN core team assisted in setting up the DNN development environment and provided best practice for skin and module development. After numerous cycles of development, refining code and integrating DNN more effectively, extensions to the framework became a priority to provide feature-rich functionality. Working closely with the e-commerce team, Cantarus provided training to support existing developers and composed informative wikis to support contractors and other staff working on the project. Upon completion of the project, Cantarus returned to deploy a successful platform upgrade to DNN 7.

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Cantarus was considered for their Gold Partner status and dominance as the premier UK supplier of DNN to provide development, integration and training services for SportsDirect.com

Jay Lyford, IT Manager, Sports Direct